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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (24183)	1/13/2004 3:53:11 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793681

The use of the term WMD by the UN, the Clinton & Bush Admin's regarding WMD was consistent. It was not misrepresented or exaggerated...... Once again, that is not the point. The point I made had to do with WMD as a term of art and its usage in common parlance. I spent some time a few days ago on this board explaining the usage of "responsibility" and "accountability" as terms of art as opposed to the way regular people understand them. I submit that regular people think of WMD as something fearsome. After all, "mass destruction" is pretty fearsome. I was watching a movie the other day on TV where the heroine put some ammonia in a spray bottle and used it to back off some guard dogs by stinging their eyes. Technically, a spray bottle of ammonia is a WMD because it's a chemical weapon. OTOH, a daisy cutter bomb isn't. Now, any normal person would be more afraid of terrorists with daisy cutters than terrorists with ammonia sprays. They'd probably invite the latter in to clean their windows. So, when ordinary people heard WMD, they thought of something horrid like nukes or smallpox, not ammonia sprays. The label used by the Administration may have been technically correct but it left an impression either intentionally or not that Saddam was more fearsome than he really was. It seems reasonable to me that folks in the Administration should have known they were using terms of art in a way that ordinary people wouldn't correctly interpret. Government 101 says to use the KISS approach with no jargon in communicating with the public. Any GS-5 knows that.